The chief nursing officer of Hippocratic AI, an Adtalem partner, on the future role of artificial intelligence in nursing.
For the more than 4 million registered nurses in the U.S., artificial intelligence is increasingly playing a role in the care they provide. How will this rapidly evolving technology help the most-trusted profession provide patient-centered care, improve their own wellbeing, and decrease the workforce shortage?
We asked Dr. Amy McCarthy, chief nursing officer of Hippocratic AI, which has partnered with Adtalem Global Education to develop a comprehensive suite of educational materials to train clinicians on the use of AI in healthcare.
Early in her career, Dr. McCarthy was a maternal newborn nurse. She also has more than a decade of leadership experience, including as director of nursing for women, infants, and oncology. In addition to her work with Hippocratic AI, she is president of the Texas Nurses Association and has served as director-at-large on the American Nurses Association Board of Directors.
What do nurses and other healthcare professionals need to know about artificial intelligence?
AI is here to stay. It is going to impact their practice, if it hasn’t already. It’s important to understand that in our training as clinicians, we didn’t have a lot of education on technology and AI. As clinicians, it’s essential we continue to educate ourselves on the changes happening in our environment because we need to be a part of those conversations, especially as these new products are being implemented in our workspaces. We need to understand it so that we can advocate for our patients and ensure that what’s being put in patient care settings is safe, ethical and truly augmenting the work that we’re able to do.
How do you ensure that AI is as safe or safer than humans doing the same job?
At Hippocratic AI, we’re constantly bringing clinicians in to evaluate AI—it’s central to our mission of doing no harm and ensuring that our product is safe for patients! I encourage clinicians to ask companies, “Who has been involved in the creation and testing of this product? How is it HIPAA compliant? What have the conversations been around ethics?” Ensure that a human—preferably a clinician—has been in the loop when it comes to testing what this AI sounds like or acts like. That provides more legitimacy and gives me a lot of confidence.
Is AI going to take nurses’ jobs?
AI is a tool. It is meant to augment nursing, not replace nursing. If we can understand and harness it, it will help us solve many of the issues we see in practice today. You may often see nurses react negatively to new technology, but the reason for this is it’s often implemented without the feedback of the clinician who will be using it! Suddenly, we have a new product that we are responsible for using, but it doesn’t fit into our workflows—adding one more thing to the growing list of tasks nurses perform every day. This can lead to distractions, which ultimately is a risk to patient care. That was always my biggest fear as a nurse and a leader. In the world of women’s and infants, it’s crucial to be present at the bedside of a patient in labor or with a new parent learning to care for a newborn—if a nurse is distracted by trying to get a piece of technology to work, it takes away from this process. While I may not be directly at the bedside anymore, it’s these moments that drive me to try and solve this problem every day.
AI truly can help us to solve things like burnout and the administrative burden that’s been placed on nurses. There are so many tasks that continue to pile up on clinicians. AI has the capability to start removing that. In fact, I think it’s one of the few solutions that I’ve seen in years that could realistically help to start solving this crisis rather than adding to the burden with another technology.
Before you moved into leadership roles, you worked as a maternal newborn nurse. What AI do you wish that you had back then?
I wish that I had AI assistance with documentation, especially as a maternal newborn nurse. There’s so much documentation that has to occur when you’re doing frequent assessments and when you’re doing feedings. When I look at technologies today, like ambient listening, if we had technology like that while I was working with babies, I could have been speaking and have my charting done for me in real time. Then I could have dedicated more time to working with the infants and their families.
How could AI have helped you in nurse leadership?
AI can significantly alleviate the burdens faced by nurse leaders, particularly nurse managers, by streamlining tasks related to data analysis, patient experience, and employee engagement. AI agents can facilitate more frequent and meaningful interactions with employees and assist with patient experience rounds. Instead of manually sifting through data in spreadsheets, large language models can analyze data swiftly, providing preliminary insights. This allows nurse leaders to focus their clinical expertise on interpreting the results more efficiently. By saving time and enhancing productivity, AI becomes a game changer for nurses and nurse leaders.
How do you keep AI from perpetuating bias and health disparities?
A lot of the answer is being very intentional. Large language models are trained using data that humans create. Part of the issue is that humans have biases and stereotypes, so we are working on what information is being fed in and testing it during the evaluation process.
I’ll give you an example. We know that African American women struggle immensely when it comes to maternal mortality and morbidity, and we don’t want large language models interacting with patients to perpetuate stereotypes. In fact, we want it to do the opposite. So, when I’m testing, I’m very intentional when asking AI agents questions around the African American population and making sure it’s not giving biased answers. Some of that requires continuous iteration. And, again, it’s where clinicians come in. When our nurses are testing calls and scripts are about to go live with a partner, they’re looking for those things and ensuring that the conversation that the AI agent is having with a patient is intentional and equitable.
What impact will AI, when it’s used successfully, have on the nursing workforce shortage?
I think right now nurses are leaving the bedside in mass because what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis is not sustainable. It’s stressful. There’s pressure to not just take care of patients who are coming in sicker and sicker, but also all these other tasks that are being placed on them: incident reporting, quality assurance, patient experience, hourly rounding. The list is just a lot. When I look at a nurse today, I take apart the tasks that they have in their setting. I take apart their workflow and think about where AI can fit in, whether it’s pieces of charting that we take away and summarize for them so that they can spend more time with their patient. Or is it assisting them with some of their patient rounding—again, not completely replacing nurses and their patient check-ins, but augmenting their ability to check in more often. That alone gives a nurse time back in their day.
When I speak to people who have been nurses for 20 to 30 years, they talk about the “Golden Age of Nursing” and how years ago they were able to really spend time with their patients. I want to bring nursing back to where it is more relationship focused and less task oriented. The reason nurses go into the profession is because we want to help people and make an impact—creating an environment where this is possible should be a priority for all companies looking to re-design healthcare.
For more information, email the Adtalem Global Communications Team: adtalemmedia@adtalem.com.
